Monday, May 14, 2007

Weekend gaming report

I have some mixed feelings after playing Command & Conquer 360 over the weekend. On one hand, I was having a great old time and got right back into the RTS groove. Using the control pad works just fine and playing the game on my couch with big TV + surround sound is fantastic.

The biggest annoyance so far is how easy it is to mess up the bonus objectives. They can even pop up after it’s too late to do anything. I save quite often, but usually don’t keep more than five or six during a mission. Now I have to keep like a dozen just to make sure I don’t have to replay huge chunks of it. I’m maybe half-way through the GDI missions on Medium difficulty and I’m not sure if my enjoyment level will sustain me for all three campaigns. I’m really hoping the NOD campaign is more fun than the GDI.

The week’s releasesI stumbled across Etrian Odyssey for the first time last week and it’s kind of intriguing. From what I’ve read, it sounds a lot like Wizardry with a heavy dose of map making and anime art. There are no formal reviews yet, which makes me nervous because the last quirky Atlus game I almost bought was Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja. Everything pre-release about Izuna like the art and the wacky premise screamed “must purchase!”. Then the reviews hit and it turned out it didn’t have much of a story or characters after all. Worst of all, it was an unforgivingly difficult bitch of a dungeon crawler.

I’ll skip on Etrian unless someone tells me different. Especially since Oendan 2 comes out in Japan this week and I have that bad boy pre-ordered. Woohoo!PC conundrum round 3I priced a few more PCs online and I just hate the configurations. Especially since there were a lot of renewed rumblings over ATI’s upcoming Direct X10 cards. I’m definitely going to wait and see what their low-end card will cost in PCs from Dell and HP. Until then, I have to use my home rig sparingly.